Pre-school, we clung to knots
in a long, thick rope
& made our way across the college campus,
orderly as a centipede.
Of our routes or destinations I recall
nothing, I have learned & forgotten
whole languages since then, but
that sense of my place
as node on a travelling rhizome
has stayed with me: I can still feel,
like the final consonant of some forbidden word
the tongue can almost taste,
that fibrous knot.
Ghazal of the Transcendental
Why can’t the Buddha vacuum underneath the sofa?
Because he has no attachments. ~ Kaspalita Thompson
One of the neighbors has a new statue of the Buddha, plunked down in her garden.
Perhaps she got it at a Black Friday sale, camped out all night, came home singing.
The Buddha teaches that we want to work free of delusion and suffering
in order to ascend, like the wren in the lilac, full-throated, singing.
I don’t know too many intimate details about his life but I do know
the Buddha was not a woman doing chores all day, much less singing.
Suffering is a pain in the ass, in the neck, in the heart mostly; since I
suffer knowing my children’s hurts, will I never know that lithe, joyous singing?
So the sacred verses speak of attachment and illusion. I know, but with all due
respect, it’s hard to feel detached when you nick yourself shaving (not singing).
Perhaps in the wilderness, in solitude, there might not be the struggle that comes of engagement: but even then, there is the noise the mind makes in its own singing.
The Buddha can’t vacuum underneath my sofa. Or under the beds. Or do the dishes.
I know, I know. If I were to detach from these tasks, they’d be easy as singing.
And one must sing rather than drone, don’t you think? Even in the bramble, that’s
what the birds are saying: the richer the song, the more complex the singing.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
The authentic world
Everyone seems to be welding, fixing things, making things in small dim workshops or outside on the dusty, potholed streets. We drive past an open shed, dark, full of big carcases hanging on hooks; past a man in a green and yellow dragon suit striding along the street, clutching the dragon’s head while his own head hangs between hunched shoulders as if depressed.
Black Friday vs. hunting season
By now I’m sure you’ve heard about the mini riots that broke out at big-box stores all across the U.S. yesterday as desperate bargain-hunters, squeezed by a shrinking economy, fought over Christmas gifts. I’d like to think these incidents, played up by a conflict-addicted media, don’t represent the behavior or attitudes of Americans in general. In fact, for the small percentage of folks who still get up off the couch to go hunting for wild game, the opening day of regular-rifle deer season is a much bigger deal. And here in Pennsylvania, that falls on the Monday after Thanksgiving.
Continue reading “Black Friday vs. hunting season”
Paper Ghazal
Where waves roll onto the beach, sand the color of sable— that wet
surface on which fleeting messages are written: a kind of paper.
Restaurant napkins, gas station receipts, the merest strip of found
Chinese fortune cookie fortune: I’ve scribbled on these instead of paper.
In a calligraphy book, the character for poetry combines the ideographs
for “mind” and “dancing”. Tiny birds leave prints on the shore: their paper.
Old newspapers, bits of grass, leaves and petals, bark:
sieved through a screen frame, they find new lives as paper.
Sun not yet high, but frost melts quickly. Grass glistens. The world is full
of screens. But I prefer a window full of steam on which to draw— like paper.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Insurgent Song
This year, such burdens as we haven’t
seen before; such rain that fell to saturate
the earth— but underground, the sound
of currents clamoring to rise, be heard.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Thanksgiving walk
It’s a tradition in our family to go out for a walk after the mid-day meal on Thanksgiving and Christmas, sometimes all together, but more commonly by ourselves or in smaller groups. This might seem strange to those for whom constant family togetherness is mandatory on such occasions, but, well, some of the holiday traditions of other folks seem strange to us, too: lolling around watching other people play sports, for example, or lining up outside stores on Black Friday morning. To each his own. Continue reading “Thanksgiving walk”
Maguindanao Ghazal
Fiat justitia ruat caelum.
(Let justice be done though the heavens fall.)
The bodies are no longer there. They’ve dug them up
and carried them off, exhumed from shallow graves.
They’ve laid them out and counted, set torsos and limbs
aright, sewed shut the seams. The sea cannot be their grave.
Who made the pile of fresh dirt at the woods’ edge?
They gored and slit the very air. Oh most depraved.
Not even the womb was sacred. Not kin, not friend, not
bystander. Not hair, not skin struck by gun barrel or stave.
What are they worth, who are no longer here? Warped leaves
in the canopy condemn the unresolved: they won’t forgive.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Ghazal: Chimerae
First poem, last poem, I told my class tonight. Confession:
I’m always writing that dream book, wandering with its chimeras.
Wind and fog, and then just wind. Silhouettes of goldfinches
indistinguishable from leaves. Then silence like a caesura.
In the Iliad: a thing of immortal make, not human, lion-fronted,
snake behind; goat in the middle, breath from a hot caldera.
Always I’m of more than two minds: heart ravenous as a craw,
mud-burdened as an ox. My real self, vertiginous in the sierras.
It’s late November and the birds come back in droves to Mt. Ampacao.
In darkness, hunters wait: 20 meters of nylon nets strung along the frontera.
From high up, the flush of bonfires must look like dawn; the terraces,
low stone walls against the mountainside, like streaks of dark mascara.
High-pitched cries, vague feathered bodies in the mesh. I’m not there but I
too pan the air: I want what flies, what lifts my pulleys, bones, my aura.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Tezcatlipoca
A small toad carved from obsidian
regards me with what
could pass for a smile:
for I am hunched, torsioned,
oblique as any letter
in the insect alphabet.
Its sightless eyes freeze me
between a tick & a tock.
What will I do for a knife?
The night holds its tongue
like a secret agent.
This is not a blackness that absorbs light
but a blackness that reflects.
If it were water, I would enter it
incrementally, yielding to absence
like a zipper coming apart.
If it were a mirror, I would mount it
on the stump that used to be my left foot,
so as I walked over the earth, my enemies
would see only themselves
& learn to take the blame for
all their ills.